Monday, December 13, 2010

Iraqi Swede bombs for the Prophet

Satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad are taken very seriously by Sunni extremists. Evidently they believe that killing the cartoonist or launching a terrorist attack in the cartoonist's country will be rewarded by Allah.

Or was the bomber a Shiite? I bet he was Sunni. The al-Qaeda linked "Islamic State of Iraq" praised the bombing. Does anybody else wonder if he was Sunni? Or would that kind of thinking make one "sectarian"?

"Born in Baghdad, as a child he emigrated, with his parents and sisters, to Sweden, where he enjoyed an unremarkable upbringing in a small provincial town, acquiring citizenship along the way. He moved to Britain in 2001, settling in Luton, where he studied for a degree, married and fathered two children.

Mr Abdel Wahab’s unexceptional background recalls that of Lors Doukaiev, a young Belgian of Chechen background who was injured when his makeshift bomb detonated prematurely in Copenhagen in September. Mr Doukaiev is awaiting trial.

The two youthful terrorists had both been angered by what they considered to be blasphemous cartoons. Mr Doukaiev reportedly travelled to Denmark to letter-bomb Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that, notoriously, published a number of satirical drawings of the Prophet Mohammad in 2005."

it is a well known fact that iraqis are the scum of the earth, they have mental problems like no other people. they hold on to 1000 year old grudges and then start murdering each other based on their "sect".

This is true because Iraqis have been through some serious shit in the last five decades, especially in the last 7 years.

"they hold on to 1000 year old grudges and then start murdering each other based on their "sect"."

Before 2003, before Sunni extremists started mass murdering Iraqi Shia, Iraqis did not even talk about sect, even after Saddam's regime murdered 300,000 Iraqi Shia in 1991.

I did not know I am Shi3i until I learned about my parents' home town Najaf as a teenager. It didn't really occur to me that Saddam was Sunni until I starting reading Amnesty International reports about Saddam's persecution of Iraqi Shia. I did not identify with my sect until Iraqi Shia were mass murdered by the Sunni Salafi 3arab jarab.

BAGHDAD, Aug. 30 — Shatha al-Musawi, a Shiite member of Parliament, first encountered the Sunni-Shiite divide on the day the Americans captured Saddam Hussein. Hearing the news with a close Sunni friend named Sahira, Ms. Musawi erupted like a child.

“I jumped, I shouted, I came directly to Sahira and I hugged her,” Ms. Musawi said. “I was crying, and I said, ‘Sahira, this is the moment we waited for.’ ”

At least it should have been: Mr. Hussein’s henchmen killed Ms. Musawi’s father when she was only 13; Sahira, too, was a victim, losing her closest uncle to the Hussein government.

But instead of celebrating, Sahira stood stiffly. A day later, Ms. Musawi said, Sahira’s eyes were red from crying. And before long, like so many Sunnis and Shiites here, the two stopped talking.

Sectarianism, the issue Ms. Musawi said she had wanted to avoid, has instead come to haunt her. She entered politics four years ago, flush with idealism, working closely with Sunnis on Iraq’s Constitution and a draft law that would compensate victims of Mr. Hussein.

Now, even for her, one of Parliament’s most independent figures, the urge to reconcile is being blacked out by distrust, disappointment and visceral anger.

Her disillusionment helps explain why the Iraqi government has missed most of the political benchmarks laid down by Congress, as the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report to be released in coming days.

And her reasons — for defending Shiite militias as a necessary response to Sunni Arab violence, for example — are personal. As with many of Iraq’s leaders, her life has been rubbed raw. After seeing Sunni neighbors kill Shiite friends, and after being pushed out of her own home by violence, Ms. Musawi has struggled to move beyond the pain and anger.

“Many Iraqis are still living in the past, and she too is affected with this predicament,” said Mohammed Mahmoud Ahmad, chairman of the victims compensation committee, where Ms. Musawi is a deputy. For Iraqis of all sects, old offenses linger for decades. And at the simple apartment in the Green Zone that she shares with her second husband (a Sunni Kurd), Ms. Musawi, 40, described a score of abuses. '

'...Shias have never risen beyond the glass ceiling that separates them from the Sunni elite. A few, such as Saddam's last and highly colorful information minister, Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, rose to prominence. But they were tokens in a world where Shia feet never trod the real halls of power. Saddam Hussein liked to make much of the second part of his name before his Shia subjects - especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s - but he nevertheless characterized Shias as Iranian lackeys, and he periodically purged the Ba'th Party of its Shia members in order to make sure that the levers of state power and the banner of Arab nationalism remained firmly in Sunni hands. Shia privates filled the ragtag conscript ranks of Saddam's poorly equipped and ill-trained regular army, but the elite Republican Guards and Special Republican Guards were Sunnis almost to a man. Iraqi Shias revealed what they thought of the Ba'th Party when they insisted on including a clause in the August 2005 draft constitution that would ban all "racist" institutions, meaning among other things the Ba'th Party, and that barred former Ba'thists from holding office.'

Baghdad in 2000: "A woman known as Um Haydar was beheaded reportedly without charge or trial at the end of December 2000. She was 25 years' old and married with three children. Her husband was sought by the security authorities reportedly because of his involvement in Islamist armed activities against the state. He managed to flee the country. Men belonging to Feda'iyye Saddam came to the house in al-Karrada district and found his wife, children and his mother. Um Haydar was taken to the street and two men held her by the arms and a third pulled her head from behind and beheaded her in front of the residents. The beheading was also witnessed by members of the Ba'ath Party in the area. The security men took the body and the head in a plastic bag, and took away the children and the mother-in-law. The body of Um Haydar was later buried in al-Najaf. The fate of the children and the mother-in-law remains unknown."